Over time, you come to realise everybody who was there has a story. Everybody remembers the details – even the people who suffered the most and would rather airbrush it from their minds.
No supporter of Manchester United during their glory years with Sir Alex Ferguson will forget the wild, eccentric day Ole Gunnar Solskjaer came on as a substitute away to Nottingham Forest and scored four times in 13 minutes.
It was one of the more spectacular nine-goal thrillers of the Premier League era. It was just a pity, perhaps, if you were a Forest fan, that the visitors scored eight of them.
“I think I made them angry,” says Alan Rogers, the former Forest defender. “I scored… which I think upset them. I made it 1-1 and we were thinking, ‘Right, here we go’. The only problem was United thought, ‘No, no, no! Here we go’. I have shown my kids the video of me scoring that day against Manchester United. But I turned off the highlights after that one went in. They didn’t need to see any more of what happened.”
On Tuesday, when United take on Forest at Old Trafford, it will be the first time the two have renewed acquaintances since Solskjaer’s masterclass and a result that both clubs remember for entirely different reasons.
It has become known as simply ‘the 8-1’.
The date was February 6, 1999 – the 41st anniversary of the Munich air disaster – and it was the first time United had scored eight times away from home since they were known as Newton Heath.
It was the prelude to Ferguson’s team winning the Treble three months later and Solskjaer jutting out his foot, on a sweet-scented night at Camp Nou in Barcelona, for his “Football… bloody hell” moment in the Champions League final against Bayern Munich.
And, for Forest, it was part of the story that led to relegation and spending the next 23 years out of the Premier League.
“Ole scored four goals without breaking sweat,” says David May, the former United defender who was with him on the bench that day. “Only one of them was a tap-in, too. They were difficult chances to finish. I remember thinking, ‘Fuck me, how does he do it?’. I was laughing at him in the dressing room afterwards, laughing and shaking my head because he was a freak of nature. Ole, of course, just played it down.”
Ferguson was on holiday recently in Australia.
He went to visit Dwight Yorke, now the coach of Sydney-based A-League side Macarthur FC, and the conversation turned to that game in Nottingham. Yorke had something he wanted to get off his chest.
“I asked him why he took me off when I’d scored two goals and was on for a hat-trick,” says Yorke. “He did that a few times to me. I was very unhappy that day when I came off and I told him recently. He replied, ‘I’ve never not seen you smile!’.
“I was happy for Ole, for his four goals and winning 8-1, but the boss denied me a hat-trick. I’d been playing football long enough to know there were more goals in us. We were battering Forest, tearing them apart and we were on a roll. I can laugh now but I wasn’t laughing then.”
Teddy Sheringham, Dwight Yorke and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer helped Manchester United win the Treble in 1999 (Photo: Alex Livesey /Allsport)
The 1990s had some harrowing moments for Forest – the Gazza FA Cup final, Brian Clough’s retirement and the overall sense that nothing was ever going to be quite the same again – but these were still years when they were regarded among England’s elite teams.
Frank Clark had led them to a third-placed finish in their first Premier League season, post-Clough, in 1994-95. It was the team of Stan Collymore, Bryan Roy, Lars Bohinen and Steve Stone. The following year, Forest were the last English representatives standing in Europe as they got to the last eight of the old UEFA Cup (today’s Europa League).
By the time that 1998-99 season got underway, however, the rot had set in.
“Oh God, that’s the Ron Atkinson season, isn’t it?” says David Marples, a Forest fan, writer and author. “That’s the Pierre van Hooijdonk season, too. We started OK in the first few games. And then, bloody hell… just look at the results on Wikipedia for the rest of the season. It’s endless red (for defeats) and yellow (for draws). The 8-1 could, and should, have been even more.”
Van Hooijdonk had gone on strike, protesting against the sales of Kevin Campbell and Colin Cooper after Forest won promotion the previous season. The Dutchman was eventually persuaded to come back in the November only to find himself shunned by his team-mates.
Former United manager Atkinson was appointed after the sacking of Dave Bassett in early January and, in a moment of pure tragicomedy, introduced himself to a new set of supporters by climbing into the wrong dugout for his first match, at home to Arsenal.
Ron Atkinson climbs into the wrong dugout for his home bow with Nottingham Forest (Photo: RossKinnaird /Allsport)
As for Forest’s new signings, they were finding it difficult to make a favourable impression. “I have zero recollection of (defenders) Jesper Mattsson or Stale Stensaas,” says a melancholic Marples. “Absolutely none. Nothing.”
United, on the other hand, were at the peak of their powers.
Even with Ryan Giggs missing for the trip to Nottingham, it was a team packed with elite internationals. David Beckham was in midfield with Roy Keane and Paul Scholes. Jaap Stam was patrolling the defence with the Neville brothers, Gary and Phil. Peter Schmeichel glared out from the goalmouth. Yorke’s partnership with Andy Cole up front was regarded as the best in the business.
“I’ve faced great strikers in the past but you don’t normally see two at a time like that,” says Dave Beasant, Forest’s goalkeeper that day. “It was even more frightening that they could bring on Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who would be in anyone else’s team from the start.”
The tone was set for an already bottom-of-the-league Forest early on as Yorke put league leaders United ahead inside the opening 90 seconds.
“I remember one of our players, Jean-Claude Darcheville, making a run,” says Forest defender Craig Armstrong. “Jaap Stam just put an arm across him and stopped him dead in his tracks. Thump! I am not sure Darcheville fancied that one. The next thing you know, he is pointing and waving at the bench, telling them he had a hamstring problem. He got himself off the pitch, with only 25 minutes gone.”
Armstrong had been playing that season as a centre-half but Atkinson wanted to experiment with the academy graduate as a left-back and turn Rogers, who usually filled that role, into a left winger. Armstrong, known as ‘Spuggy’, accepts it did not work.
“I remember coming in at half-time and (midfielder) Scot Gemmill was having a pop at me, telling me I needed to get closer to Beckham. He was giving me a right going over.
“I turned round to Scot and asked him how, exactly, he expected me to do that. They were stood on the halfway line, with Gary Neville passing the ball to Beckham. When we closed Beckham down, he would just give it back to Neville. Then he would get the ball back again and either switch play or put in a cross. They were just playing around us. I wasn’t sure what Scot expected me to do.
“And I remember Ron (Atkinson) piping up and saying, ‘In all fairness, Scot, he has a point’.”
Manchester United’s players celebrate yet another goal at Forest (Photo: Gary M Prior/Allsport)
Watch the footage now and it becomes a little easier to understand why Yorke can remember feeling almost sympathetic towards the home team.
“I have a theory about Beckham, because he was such a strange, unique player,” says Rogers. “He couldn’t take on a full-back. He couldn’t beat an opposition player. You knew he was not going to go past you, or outrun you. He would just stand on the touchline, way out wide.
“You couldn’t properly mark him because you would be pulled out of position. It was impossible to stay with him and keep your shape. So he would just stand there and whip in balls behind the central defenders. It was a serious gift. You couldn’t stop him from doing it.”
There was also no doubt that Forest were obliging opponents for a team who had already set the record for the biggest home win of the Premier League years — a 9-0 demolition of Ipswich Town in March 1995.
Besides Armstrong being shifted out to left-back, Forest had a makeshift defence in other ways that day. Midfielder John Harkes, then a USA international, was the right-back. Former England midfielder Carlton Palmer was at centre-half with Jon Olav Hjelde.
It was only 2-1 at half-time, but the second half quickly became an ordeal for the home team.
Cole struck first, with his second goal of the afternoon. Then it was Yorke’s turn again. Both strikers were going for hat-tricks.
There were 24 minutes of the 90 to go, and things were just getting interesting.
“We were 4-1 down and I was thinking, ‘We should just try to shut up shop and keep it at this’,” says Rogers. “But Ron still wanted to go for it. That’s why Spuggy was subbed (for Portuguese winger Hugo Porfirio). Big Ron wanted us to be more attacking. He was telling me to drive forward. ‘Get a goal and we are back in this’. I was thinking, ‘Are you sure?’, but he was shouting, ‘Get up the pitch’.
“Before we know it, they had got five, six, seven, eight… It all got painful, very quickly.”
Contrary to popular belief, Solskjaer is not quite the most prolific super-sub of the Premier League era.
By his own admission, there was an element of “myth” attached to his reputation.
Jermain Defoe holds the record for the most goals as a substitute in England’s top division with 24. Olivier Giroud is next on 21. Then come Javier Hernandez, Nwankwo Kanu and Daniel Sturridge. Solskjaer is sixth on the list, with 17.
But it suited United for the Norwegian’s reputation to develop. In some games, Ferguson would tell him to warm up, simply because he knew the mere sight of him on the touchline would worry the opponents. He was, in the manager’s words, the “substitute from Hell”.
“In games, sitting on the bench, and in training sessions, he would make notes,” Ferguson writes of Solskjaer in his autobiography. “So by the time he came on, he had analysed who the opponents were, what positions they were assuming. He had those images all worked out. The game was laid out for him like a diagram and he knew where to go and when.”
All of which brings us to the 72nd minute of Forest vs United, with the score at 4-1 to the visitors and the away end taunting Atkinson, Ferguson’s Old Trafford predecessor, with cries of “Big Ron for England”.
“Ordinarily, if you’re swapping out Dwight Yorke, you know the team’s attacking output is going to drop off,” says Steve Bartram, co-author of The Impossible Treble, a book about United’s greatest-ever season. “But nobody in Nottingham that day expected United’s menace to decrease with Ole on the pitch. Jim Ryan (the United coach) famously told him, ‘Keep it simple’ when he came on. So he followed instructions and did what he found simpler than anyone else: scoring goals.”
Dwight Yorke: ‘Forest fell to bits that day’ (Photo: Gary M Prior/Allsport)
Solskjaer scored his first after eight minutes on the pitch. The score remained ‘only’ 5-1 as the game ticked into its 87th minute. Then, in the next six minutes of normal and added time, he added another three. It was a blitz.
GO DEEPER
Golden Games: No 44, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer for Manchester United v Nottingham Forest
“Forest fell to bits,” says Yorke. “I know Ole was scoring, but I just wanted the whistle to blow. You can be ruthless, but I didn’t like seeing a team concede eight. Five is solid, but when you go six, seven and eight, you feel some empathy for the other team.”
“It was the lowest of the low,” says Beasant. “It had taken me 20 years to concede that many goals in a match.”
At least Armstrong, who still lives in Nottingham, can pass off the responsibility for Forest’s late collapse.
“Thankfully I came off when the score was still 4-1. A lot of the Forest fans I know always take it out on me. One lad always tells me I was marking Solskjaer when he scored four goals. But I was actually sitting in the dugout, watching it, rather than having to go through it.”
All these years later, Forest supporters of a certain generation prefer to remember what happened in their title-winning season in 1977-78, when Clough’s team went to Old Trafford and won 4-0 — a thrashing of United that can be found on the internet by typing in the words, “A lesson in football”.
The 8-1, however, was so unique it has its own Wikipedia page.
It is remembered by Ferguson as “devastation on a grand scale”.
It remained the biggest away win of the Premier League era until Leicester’s 9-0 at Southampton in October 2019.
The previous record had been set, ironically, by Forest with a 7-1 win at Sheffield Wednesday in April 1995 that was memorable for the home fans applauding the last few goals. Against Fergie’s mob, however, there was no show of appreciation for what the 30,025 crowd were seeing. Most Forest supporters watched in stunned silence.
It was also Steve McClaren’s first away trip after being appointed as Ferguson’s assistant. Afterwards, McClaren strolled into the United dressing room, blew out his cheeks and asked, “Is it like this every week?”.
As for Solskjaer, he had his shower, got on the team coach and politely turned down all media requests to talk about what he had just done, even declining a brief word with the BBC’s flagship Match Of The Day highlights show. His work was done.
“Some years later, I spoke to the former Norway manager Age Hareide,” says Bartram. “He demolished the notion of the happy, smiley striker being the nicest guy in the world. ‘Ole can be a real bastard when he wants to be’, he warned. Forest’s defenders likely agreed.
“United could easily have run down the clock, coasting against relegation-threatened strugglers while pursuing three major trophies. Instead, Ole saw a time to feast. Most footballers in his situation would have lapped the City Ground, cupping their ears after each goal. Ole just cracked a little smile and kept scoring.”
Additional reporting: Andy Mitten.
(Top photo: Tony Marshall – PA Images via Getty Images)